


Warm Milk & Honey

by frumplebump



Series: Suraya [3]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic, Nightmares, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:42:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28252602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frumplebump/pseuds/frumplebump
Summary: Bakura wanted to tell Suraya that he knew the milk and honey potion would work because he had once been the nightmare.
Series: Suraya [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2069649
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Warm Milk & Honey

**Author's Note:**

> Like its companion piece, Attribution, I wrote this a while ago and kept it to myself. Thanks to rochelleechidna for your kind words about Seismic, as well as all the other comment conversations we've had this year, which reminded me that so much of the fun of writing fic is sharing it!
> 
> Suraya (Malik's daughter from Seismic) is about seven or eight years old in this.

“Baba?”

Bakura grunted and rolled onto his side, blinking the sleep from his eyes. Suraya stood beside the bed, staring at him, and from the urgent twinge in her voice he realized she must have tried calling him a few times already. Her hair was mussed, her eyes were wide and glassy, and she had her arms wrapped tight around her favorite stuffed animal: a whale shark Malik bought her the first time they took her to the aquarium.

As consciousness filtered back into his brain, he realized that he hadn’t heard her call him _baba_ in a long time, maybe even years. From the beginning, he had insisted that she would call him by his name, that nothing like _daddy_ would ever be attached to him. But as a baby, the best she could do with _Bakura_ was _baba_ , and of course that delighted Malik, because it was the Arabic equivalent to _papa_. He encouraged it, and Bakura grudgingly allowed it. Once Suraya had a better handle on language, _baba_ receded to a pet name, one that she only used when she was feeling unusually affectionate or manipulative or scared.

“What is it?” Bakura looked at the time on his phone; it was 1:30 in the morning, and he’d been asleep just long enough for all his bones to turn to lead. It was too much effort to lift his head off the pillow as he peered at Suraya.

“I had a bad dream,” Suraya said. Her voice trembled, and her gaze slipped away from him. He noticed the rigid muscles in her arms as she clutched her whale shark to her torso.

“Oh.” He pushed himself up onto an elbow. “What was it about?”

She shook her head, still staring at the floor. “Bad stuff.”

“Okay. You don’t have to talk about it.”

Suraya shifted from foot to foot, then finally met his eyes again. “Can I sleep in here?”

Bakura swallowed a sigh. Malik would be home from his business trip tomorrow evening, and Bakura had been looking forward to enjoying a final night of sprawling his limbs across the entire bed without being shoved back to his own side. But Suraya’s eyes were glistening with tears she was fighting not to shed, and she looked so small with her arms squeezed around that ridiculous toy.

“Yeah, get in,” he said, lifting up the cover and scooting towards the other side of the bed.

She tossed the whale shark in first, then crawled up beside him. A hint of a smile fluttered involuntarily across her face as Bakura let the cover sink down over her shoulders.

“No kicking,” he warned, “or you’re going right back to your room.”

Suraya nodded, snuggling her face against her stuffed toy.

For a moment she was quiet, and Bakura started to edge back towards sleep. Then she spoke, her voice not much louder than a whisper. “I miss Daddy.”

“He’ll be home tomorrow,” Bakura said.

She gazed at him, her head resting on Malik’s pillow. “But I miss him right now.”

“Yeah. I miss him too, sunshine.” It was Malik’s pet name for her and it slipped out before he could catch himself. He felt a burn of self-consciousness across his cheeks. “Anyway, let’s try to get some sleep, it’s late.”

Bakura shut his eyes, but barely a minute passed before Suraya chirped, “I can’t sleep.”

“Come on, you barely even tried.”

“Yes I did. I’m not tired now.”

Bakura rolled his eyes behind closed lids, then opened them to glower at Suraya. She was undeterred.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Can I have a snack?”

“Will you promise to try to sleep afterwards?”

She nodded solemnly.

Bakura led her to the kitchen, both of them blinking in the full white glare of the overhead light. Suraya pulled herself up onto one of the stools, still cuddling her whale shark, and watched Bakura as he retrieved a carton of milk from the fridge.

“I want a _snack_ ,” she fussed. “Not milk.”

“You’ll like this.” He dug around in the cabinets until he found a jar of honey. The closest utensil to hand was a long paring knife, so he used that to coax a dollop of honey into a glass, and poured milk over it. “It’s a magic potion to help you go back to sleep after bad dreams.”

“That’s silly,” Suraya declared. “There’s no such thing as magic.”

“Is that so? Then how do you explain this?” Bakura asked, gesturing to the microwave as he put the glass inside and set it to heat up for a minute.

Suraya giggled in spite of herself, hiding her smile behind her whale shark.

When the microwave beeped, Bakura retrieved the glass, stirred it with the knife, and added a sprinkle of cinnamon on top before bringing it over to Suraya. She sipped at it dubiously, watching Bakura with narrowed eyes, but then her expression softened. “It’s good,” she admitted, licking a film of milk from her top lip. “Is it really magic?”

“It might be.” 

Bakura wanted to tell her about Ryou, eleven years old, standing alone in the kitchen, wearing pajamas that had been too short since the year before. He remembered watching from somewhere behind and above Ryou’s shoulder, yet still feeling how cold the tiled floor was on Ryou’s bare feet, as Ryou hugged his arms around himself and waited for a mug of milk to heat up. Warm milk and honey for sleep was a trick Ryou’s mother had taught him. When she was gone, Ryou carried on the tradition, although sometimes the ache of missing her was worse than the nightmares he was trying to chase away. The cinnamon, Bakura had taught him to add. Bakura could have stayed detached, but out of curiosity he let himself swirl in as close as the steam rising from Ryou’s mug, and found the sticky scent of the warm milk to be cloying and babyish. One night he moved Ryou’s arm in the direction of the mostly-depleted spice rack and let the suggestion of something that actually tasted _good_ trickle across his brain.

Bakura wanted to tell Suraya that he knew the milk and honey potion would work because he had once been the nightmare, and that he’d never found himself able to resume tormenting Ryou after the boy crawled under his covers with a warm belly and the taste of honey on his tongue. He hadn’t ever meant to torment him, really, but in the long hours of the night when he was forced to let Ryou sleep, he shuffled through his memories and agonies and obsessions, and sometimes the recollection of the screams seeped through the membrane between him and Ryou. Other times, the nightmares were all Ryou’s own, but no matter what woke the boy, his heart would always sink further when he felt the cold thump of the Ring against his chest. Bakura had told himself back then that he always paid his rent, but now, in his third attempt at something like life, he was coming to understand that teaching Ryou to add cinnamon to his honey milk might have been the closest he’d ever gotten to giving him anything back.

Suraya was watching him quietly with Malik’s eyes. She offered Bakura the glass, holding it out with both hands cupped around it. “Do you need some?”

Bakura shook his head, more in response to the sudden sting at the base of his throat than in answer to Suraya. “That’s okay,” he said. “I made that for you.”

“Do you have bad dreams?” she asked him, in a little voice.

“Sure do.”

“Daddy does, too.”

“Yeah, he does.” Bakura knew Malik had never discussed the subject of his nightmares with his daughter, but in their little house it could hardly be kept secret that Malik sobbed himself awake sometimes.

“Do you make this for him too?”

The smile that broke across Bakura’s face surprised him. “I probably should.”

Suraya leaned back to finish the last of her milk and wiped her hand across her mouth as Bakura took the glass from her. Her eyelids were starting to droop, but Bakura waited for her to admit that she was maybe feeling a little sleepy before he put the glass in the sink and turned off the kitchen lights.

“Wait!” Suraya squeaked as she followed him into the hall, darker than before now that their eyes had adjusted to brightness. “I can’t see where I’m going.”

“That’s why you count your steps on the way in, so you know how to get back out in the dark,” Bakura said. “Come here, little thief, we’ll make a proper tomb robber of you yet.” He reached for her arm and gestured for her to clamber onto his back, which she did gleefully, smothering him for a second with her whale shark as she adjusted her grip. “Look out for that trap!” she yelled in his ear, immediately playing along.

“Oh, good call,” Bakura said, swerving so steeply that Suraya shrieked with laughter.

Malik found this game inappropriate, mostly because he was sure Bakura and Suraya would fall down the stairs, but Malik wasn’t here and at the rate Suraya was growing, she might be too big to carry on his back by next year. 

Bakura ducked an imaginary wire in the bedroom doorway and then heaved Suraya, still giggling, onto the bed. “Made it,” he said. “That was a close one. Good thing you spotted that trap.”

Suraya burrowed under the sheets, looking pleased with herself. She rubbed her cheek against her whale shark’s head as she watched Bakura crawl into bed. Despite the shrieking a moment ago, she was already starting to look sleepy again, and her voice was very small when she asked, “Will you tell me a story? One of _your_ stories.”

“Once upon a time,” Bakura said, watching her eyelids slide shut, “in a land ruled by a wicked pharaoh, there lived a strong and handsome and clever thief…”


End file.
